DeepMind Framed Early AI Safety Work in ML Language

Pedro A. Ortega, former leader of the AI Safety Team at Google DeepMind, posted about the group's initial approach to the topic. He stated that AI safety was viewed as fringe at the time. The team therefore cast problems in machine learning language and reduced explicit references to philosophy. Ortega noted that a link to thinkers such as Foucault would not have been viable. The post references the Medium article 'Building safe artificial intelligence: specification, robustness, and assurance' written with Vishal Maini and the DeepMind safety team.